For this assignment, I looked at the websites for Il Pizzaiolo (http://pizzaioloprimo.com/) and Six Penn Kitchen (http://sixpennkitchen.com/news-from-the-corner.aspx). Both restaurants that were chosen are found in the city of Pittsburgh.
Six Penn Kitchen, at the time of this review, had some photos on their homepage that were aligned to the left side of the page with huge amounts of blank space to the right. The balance of the website is odd on other pages just by them all be center-aligned or left-aligned with way too much blank space. Il Pizzaiolo, however, had photos accompanying their text on almost every page.
As far as unity was concerned, everything seemed to belong on the website for Il Pizzaiolo. The text of the headers accompanied the paragraph text, the photos fit and weren’t awkward at all, and the color scheme just worked. The website for Six Penn Kitchen really dropped the ball on this one. The simple coding and the lack of effort left a lot to be desired when it came to unity in their department. The photos are awkwardly placed, the text is hard to read, and when the website is in its smallest/simplest form, it just doesn’t work.
The emphasis on most pages for Six Penn Kitchen are often lost with the giant logo in the middle of the screen. The colors of the text draw your eye, but make it hard to stay anywhere. As you navigate and scroll through the Il Pizzaiolo website, things subtly shift and change. These changes make the emphasis adapt to where you are on each page and where you should look.
The layout of these websites are quite similar, however, there is one major difference. Both of these websites use a top bar and use it to navigate throughout the websites. Il Pizzaiolo makes the bar scroll with you and has an additional side-scrolling bar for each element on each page. Six Penn kitchen highlights the page you are on and leaves you there, if you scroll down you have to go back to the top to use the bar again.
The main principles of Steve Krug’s book seem to be relevant in both, but dominant in Il Pizzaiolo. The websites rarely make me think, but I am less satisfied with Six Penn Kitchen’s design and layout. The wording is a lot more condensed and easy to scan on Il Pizzaiolo’s website, and no matter where I go I can get back or go forward with ease. Six Penn Kitchen loses in all aspects in this fight and should consider renovation.